News Stories for May 12, 2012
In These Times
On May Day, tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets. Invoking labor’s militant past, Occupiers in many cities called it a “general strike.” But few have asked why even the traditional strike has become almost an anachronism for America’s labor movement. In 1974, there were 424 major work stoppages, each involving at least 1,000 workers. By 2009, only five such stoppages occurred.
It’s easy to see this trend as damning evidence of labor’s irrelevance and the need to find a fresh wellspring of social and economic change. It’s even easier to place the blame squarely at the feet of conservative union leaders. Both these views lack nuance. Labor unions face a legal framework stacked against them. Laws can’t be casually broken: Unions have an important responsibility to their members and the financial assets they safeguard. Yet it’s worth remembering that past labor leaders believed in industrial action on a scale that would seem revolutionary even to radicals in the movement today. Figures like Samuel Gompers, Dave Beck, George Meany and Walter Reuther thought the strike was the most effective weapon of the working class. The decline of this venerable tactic has been devastating to our unions.
What’s changed?Read the source story here.
SOURCE
Wow. This is right out of the
Just wow.
Read the source story here.
The Everett Herald
Saturday's forecast is sunny, but there are clouds of uncertainty for postal workers about to do a good deed on the job.
Mail carriers delivered yellow plastic bags to households this week. Saturday is the 20th annual National Association of Letter Carriers Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. People in Snohomish County and around the country are asked to leave nonperishable food next to mailboxes for pickup.
"The whole thing is to bring attention to the problem of people going without food," said Ernie Swanson, a U.S. Postal Service spokesman.
Read the source story here.
Talking Points MemoA newly released video in Wisconsin could potentially have profound effects on the state’s recall election: Republican Gov. Scott Walker shown telling a wealthy supporter in January 2011 — before he introduced his legislation to roll back collective bargaining for public employees — that it was part of a “divide and conquer” strategy to take down organized labor, and potentially turn Wisconsin into a right-to-work state.
The video, posted Thursday night by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was shot on January 18, 2011, by documentary filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein, as part of a documentary project “As Goes Janesville,” about that industrial city’s efforts to recover from the loss of their old General Motors Plant. The Journal Sentinel notes that Lichtenstein has donated $100 to Walker’s Democratic opponent in the recall, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.
The video clip shows Walker meeting with Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks, who has since donated $510,000 to Walker’s campaign. Hendricks asked: “Any chance we’ll get to be a completely red state, and work on these unions, and become a right-to-work — what can we do to help you?”
“Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill,” Walker said. “The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. So for us, the base we get for that is the fact that we’ve got - budgetarily we can’t afford not to. If we have collective bargaining agreements in place, there’s no way not only the state but local governments can balance things out…That opens the door once we do that. That’s your bigger problem right there.”Read the source story here.
The Seattle Times
More than 50 people joined a labor-organized rally Thursday outside Amazon's South Lake Union headquarters Thursday, hoping to draw more public attention to working conditions inside the company's warehouses.
Conditions at Amazon warehouses in Pennsylvania and Kentucky have come under scrutiny in news reports where former employees describing workers collapsing in the summer heat, getting fired after injuries and other problems.
"Overnight, they can turn these bad jobs into good jobs," said John Scearcy, president of Teamsters Local 117 of Tukwila, to those who attended the noon rally.
"Does anyone out there think Amazon can't afford it?" he yelled, prompting a chorus of "No!" from the crowd. "But they're not motivated, right?"
The rally was organized by Working Washington, a union-backed organization that has developed an Amazon.com warehouse-workers bill of rights. The document includes a call for Amazon to limit the use of temporary agencies and "recognize that freedom of association and collective bargaining are an essential ingredient for a produce workforce."Read the source story here.
Thomas Reuters
Starbucks baristas were out of line sticking Industrial Workers of the World pins all over their clothing in support of attempts to be part of a labor union, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday.
The court said a Starbucks Corp policy limiting employees to displaying only one pro-union button or pin on their work uniforms was not an unfair labor practice. One employee at a Starbucks location in New York had tried to display eight union pins on her clothing, according to court papers.
The case, a dispute between the National Labor Relations Board and the company, arose out of unionization efforts at several Starbucks coffee shops in Manhattan between 2004 and 2007. None of Starbucks's 7,000 stores in the United States are unionized.Read the source story here.
The New York Times, editorial
For more than a year, House Republicans have energetically worked to demolish vital social programs that have made this country both stronger and fairer over the last half-century. At the same time, they have insisted on preserving bloated military spending and unjustifiably low tax rates for the rich. That effort reached a nadir on Thursday when the House voted to prevent $55 billion in automatic cuts imposed on the Pentagon as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, choosing instead to make all those cuts, and much more, from domestic programs.
If this bill were enacted, estimates suggest that nearly two million Americans would lose food stamps and 44 million others would find them reduced. The bill would eliminate a program that allows disabled older people to live at home and out of institutions. It cuts money that helps low-income families buy health insurance. At the same time, the House bill actually adds more than $8 billion to the Pentagon budget.
In all, the bill would cut $310 billion from domestic programs; a third of that comes out of programs that serve low- and moderate-income people. Other provisions would slash by half the budget of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was set up after the financial meltdown to protect consumers from predatory lending and other abuses, and reduce the pay of federal workers.
[...] House Democrats offered an alternative bill that would replace the $109 billion sequester by raising taxes on the wealthy, ending oil company tax loopholes and cutting farm subsidies, but it was rejected. Republicans are determined to protect millionaires and defense contractors, no matter the costs to the country.Read the source story here.
The Stand
In a vote that more than doubles the number of pilots at The Boeing Co. represented by a labor union, pilots and instructors in Flight Training Services are joining the Airplane Manufacturing Pilots Association (AMPA) bargaining unit of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), IFPTE Local 2001.
The year-long effort to join with fellow pilots culminated Thursday when votes were counted at the National Labor Relations Board Region 19 office in Seattle. The tally showed an overwhelming victory for union advocates with 48 “Yes” and 11 “no” votes. The expanded AMPA/SPEEA bargaining unit now includes 105 members.
Read the source story here.
The Stranger
Speaking at a labor-sponsored rally in the plaza outside Amazon's South Lake Union headquarters, 62-year-old Jim Herbold said he loved his 37 years working in a now-shuttered factory for US Gauge in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. "But I didn't like the union," Herbold admitted bluntly, complaining about the monthly dues and his perceived lack of responsiveness to rank and file members. "But now after working at Amazon," Herbold says of his five months laboring in a sweltering warehouse, "I understand what unions are all about."
Read the source story here.
Politico
The Koch brothers and Big Labor. The tea party and progressives. Teachers, gun owners, environmentalists, abortion-rights advocates, conservative billionaires, the national parties — name the interest group or outside party and chances are they’ve played a role in the June 5 recall campaign against Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker.
Whether it’s the casino mogul who financed Newt Gingrich’s super PAC, the billionaire who bankrolled the Swift Boats ad campaign against John Kerry or President Barack Obama’s reelection arm, in one way or another, everybody who is anybody is involved in what’s become one of the biggest political spectacles in decades.
And now it's come down to a 4-week mad dash to determine not only the Wisconsin governorship but who occupies the commanding heights in the 2012 election."Never before have we seen the floodgate of the money of the few trying to affect the outcome for the many as we do now," said Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. "I suppose Wisconsin is a microcosm of that larger national battle in a sense."
Read the source story here.
Wisconsin labor unified against Walker Teamster Nation
We heard some talk that unions supporting candidates other than Tom Barrett for Wisconsin governor were upset that he won. There was even talk that Wisconsin labor wouldn't unite behind Barrett (who the Teamsters endorsed, by the way).
Well, check out this video.
Read the source story here.
Think Progress
The ability of American workers to be upwardly mobile in the economy depends heavily on where they live, according to a state-by-state analysis from Pew Charitable Trusts. The study, the first of its kind, found that workers in a group of states largely clustered in the Northeast and Midwest are more likely to achieve upward mobility, while workers in southern states are far less likely.
For the most part, the states in each group differ on one major characteristic: the states where upward mobility is more likely are almost all union states, while the states where mobility is less likely almost all are not. Of the eight states that outperform the national average for upward economic mobility, seven are union states, with Utah the lone exception. Eight of the nine that underperform the national average, however, are so-called “right to work” states, with Kentucky the only exception.
Read the source story here.
The Seattle PI
The petroleum giant BP, which brought America the 2010 Gulf oil spill, is now speaking with its checkbook in a bid to bring Washington voters another Tim Eyman initiative in November.
BP and ConocoPhillips have each contributed $100,000 to the campaign for Initiative 1185, which would (again) put in place the requirement of a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Washington Legislature to enact new revenue measures or close corporate loopholes.
Oil refiners’ checkbooks were open two years ago, when BP put in $65,000, with fellow refiners ConocoPhillips and Equilon putting in $50,000 apiece to put Initiative 1153 on the ballot. It passed.
Despite BP’s TV ads that the Gulf Coast is coming back, and the old Conoco ads using Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and breaching whales to celebrate double-hulled tankers, big oil has fought tenaciously against a proposed per-barrel tax on oil as protection money for Puget Sound.Read the source story here.
Main Street
Can a former coal miner win an election against a millionaire? Just ask Clyde McKnight.
A retired coal miner from southern West Virginia, he worked for more than 30 years in the mines and currently serves as the South Central AFL-CIO president. McKnight defeated millionaire and former gubernatorial candidate Melvin Kessler in the Democratic primary by a razor-thin margin of 52 votes this past Tuesday, a win in large part to the grassroots efforts of working people.
A former coal miner beating out a millionaire for a state representative seat was just one of the success stories in West Virginia’s primary election. More than one-third of the 100 candidates that the West Virginia AFL-CIOendorsed this year were union members. And they’re enjoying a high success rate –of the 34 union members who ran in the state primary on Tuesday, 30 won their races.Read the source story here.
AFL-CIO Now
Republicans lawmakers across the country have attacked public employees, cutting their wages, slashing their pensions and, in some cases, eliminating their bargaining rights.They all preach the need for fiscal austerity and budget belt-tightening.
In Maine, Gov, Paul LePage is neither practicing what he preaches nor tightening his belt. Even state employees are being forced to pay more in contributions for their pensions, one isn’t: LePage. He exempted himself from the new pension formula, reports Mike Tipping in the Kennebec Journal.
On top of that, Page's pension—unlike those of public employees—isn’t calculated on length of service but is automatic. He will receive three-eighths of his salary when he leaves office, $26,600. A teacher in Maine would have to work more than 25 years to get the same annual pension.
BTW: Over the past eight years, Maine's teachers and public employees already have been subject to more than $150 million in take-backs to their wages and benefits.Read the source story here.
- The Washington Post:
Extended jobless benefits cut in eight states - Talking Points Memo:
Awkward! Republicans Who Opposed Auto Bailout Stumped By Romney Claiming Credit For It - Teamster Nation:
Romney: A rich bully who preyed on gays, workers - Daily Kos:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker claims not to remember saying he'd 'divide and conquer' unions - Forbes:
Scott Walker Using $100 Million Of Taxpayer Money To Fight Off Recall? - Crooks and Liars:
More Labor Unions Express Support for Obama's Endorsement for Marriage Equality - Daily Kos:
All the hot young people are doing it. Recalling Scott Walker, that is. - The Washington Post:
Scott Walker said budget strategy in Wisconsin was 'divide and conquer' - The Hill:
Reid furious as GOP blocks quick Senate Export-Import vote - Reuters:
Thousands of British police join anti-austerity protest - The Longview Daily News:
ILWU offers reward for information regarding union hall burglary - Talking Points Memo:
Romney's Auto Rescue Claims Don't Hold Up - The Daily Review:
Teamsters certified to represent Troy police - Think Progress:
CEOs Of Tax Dodging Corpotations Want To Cut Their Own Taxes Too - Crooks and Liars:
JPMorgan Chase Blows $2 Billion On High-Risk Derivatives - The Washington Post:
The Senate just took a big step towards filibuster reform - In These Times:
Workers Battle ExxonMobil Over Safety at Baton Rouge Refinery - The Week:
The disturbing shooting targets featuring Trayvon Martin - Truthout:
The Corporate Media's Attempt to Kill the Occupy Movement - The Washington Post:
Americans want to slash defense spending, but Washington isn't listening - Think Progress:
How Huge Paychecks For CEOs And Wall Street Traders Increase Income Inequality - The Washington Post:
It's good to be rich in America, in two graphs - The Washington Post:
No, Obama didn't admit he `forgot' about recession